A look at the month’s best reviewed crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers. From Book Marks.
Juliet Grames, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia
(Knopf)
“Deeply compelling, well-crafted … Yet the literary heart of this brilliant novel, its probing meditations on class, power, and the inevitability of crime, is rendered with the same nuance and intensity as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet.”
–Olivia Kate Corrine (Boston Globe)
Flynn Berry, Trust Her
(Viking)
“Reading Trust Her is difficult. It’s riveting, scary, horrifying. You put down the book, unable to read another word, and then pick it up again almost instantly. Berry is a past-master at ratcheting up tension.
–Janet Webb (Criminal Element)
Ruby Todd, Bright Objects
(Simon & Schuster)
“Smart, propulsively readable … Todd knows how to draw readers in. Her prose is elegant but accessible, her narrative embraces both mystery and quick plot pivots, and her protagonist, though flawed, remains sympathetic. And Todd’s grip only tightens as the story turns downright chilling.”
–Julia M. Klein (The Los Angeles Times)
Jesse Katz, The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA
(Astra House)
“Katz has constructed an ethnography of the crime, locating it within the intricate lacework of history, geography, policing and politics that the crime was knotted to … Katz…brings his formidable skills to mapping the territory of Macedo’s crime … Katz has constructed a riveting and masterful urban narrative … Sets out to understand an evil act and asks whether atonement and redemption are possible for the person who did it. It finds a web of meaning in which all of us are suspended, implying that many other crimes could be understood in such a holistic way if we took the time. As much as is possible after such a senseless tragedy, Katz makes some sense out of that September day.”
–Lorraine Berry (The Los Angeles Times)
Dan Slater, The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld
(Little Brown and Co.)
“Exuberant … Write[s] in a breezy, fast-paced style. [He] revel[s] in the Dickensian details of the demimonde—the colorful lingo, intricate professional techniques and social snobberies of the criminal classes—looping through decades of political and economic history that spills over into chatty footnotes.”
–Debby Applegate (The New York Times Book Review)
